About Me

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Frontline: “ISIS in Afghanistan" (WGBH/PBS, 2015)

After that PBS ran a Frontline
documentary that probably proved timelier than it had seemed when they
commissioned it: a story about the campaign of Islamic State against both the government and the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were
doing this as part of a split show that also covered the Taliban’s presence in
Pakistan (which is pretty much old news by now) but I turned it off after the
segment on ISIS in Afghanistan because I’d had enough coverage of terror and
destruction for a while. I couldn’t help but think throughout this program of
Margaret Mead’s famous quote, “Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only
thing that ever has.” Most people who cite that think of it in terms of a small
group of thoughtful, committed citizens trying to do good in the world, but the problem is it applies equally
well to small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens who wish to do evil. The
Ku Klux Klan, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, Operation Rescue, the Tea Party (the
modern one) and ISIS all began as small groups of thoughtful, committed
citizens (if one removes the positive value judgment usually attached to the
word “thoughtful” and just thinks of it as meaning people who have thought
deeply about what they are doing, whether the thoughts are positive or
negative) seeking to change the world, and they all accomplished that. For me,
the scariest moments of the show were the final words, from Abu Rashid, a
former Taliban who defected to al-Qaeda, in which he said, “The garden of the caliphate wants a river of blood from us.
Faith and belief demand blood. You must sacrifice to gain eternal life. God
will expand this beautiful caliphate everywhere.” Once again we’re in the
presence of people like the Nazis and the Communists who want to remake the
world no matter how many millions of people’s blood they have to spill in the
process — and while ISIS may not seem like a threat at the level of the Nazis
or the Communists now, they very well could be, especially if they achieve state
power in a country (as they are arguably close to doing in the parts of Iraq
and Syria they control) and especially
if they achieve state power in a country (like Pakistan, maybe?) that has
nuclear weapons.

The Frontline segment
on “ISIS in Afghanistan” was the work of expat Afghan journalist Najibullah
Quraishi, who’s previously done other Frontline segments on the Taliban and who this time was reporting on
a group of people so sinister, so evil, so vicious they actually make the
Taliban look good by comparison. In one interview early in the show Abu Rashid
explained that he had a moral duty to switch allegiances from the Taliban to
ISIS: “Yes, we were fighting holy war as Taliban. Our holy war was just because
there was no caliphate then. But God says when there is a caliphate, you must
join the caliphate. There is a caliphate now, so we’ve left the Taliban. We’re
fighting holy war under [the] caliph’s leadership.” Of course, some other
ex-Taliban who’ve joined ISIS have had more mercenary reasons for the change in
allegiance — like ISIS pays better: as Quraishi explained, “The commander told
me ISIS offering them $700 per month. Once they join ISIS, they get a normal
salary and they can feed their families. Afghanistan is a poor country, and you
have to do something, you have to work something, and $700 is a lot in
Afghanistan.” He shows an ISIS school where children are trained not only in
the justice of jihad but in the use of
weapons; they’re given a chance to play with Kalashnikovs, automatic pistols
and hand grenades. “What is jihad?”
says the teacher in the clip from a class shown in Quraishi’s documentary. “We
must implement God’s religion over all people. God says do jihad until
intrigue, idolatry and infidelity are gone from the world.” Elsewhere Abu
Rashid says, “We want the Islamic system all over the world, and we will fight
for it.” ISIS’s recent attacks against Lebanon, Russia (where they blew up an
airliner in mid-flight from Cairo to Moscow) and now France have been at once a
dramatic change in strategy for them — previously they’d been more like a guerrilla
army than a terrorist group, concentrating on holding territory and governing
it in Syria and Iraq rather than mounting major attacks against the West
(indeed, ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda in Iraq precisely over their belief at
the time that 9/11-style attacks on Western targets were ineffective in
bringing about the Muslim Caliphate and re-establishing Muslim rule over all
the territory between Spain and India, which was ISIS’s stated goal when it was
formed) — and a wake-up call for the world that these people are not going to
go away.

And what’s more, they’re not a force that can be vanquished by
conventional military means — ironically the Paris attack happened on November
13, the very day the U.S. had announced the killing of the ISIS official nicknamed
“Jihadi John,” and President Obama had gone on TV to announce that ISIS had
been “contained” (which in the history of bad calls ranks right up there with
“Dewey Defeats Truman”) — which only underscored that a group like ISIS has a
huge “bench.” It’s not dependent on one person, or a handful of people, because
it’s recruited enough people that for every one ISIS official or fighter we
kill, there will be 10 or more to take his place. And what’s more, every time
we send in a drone strike or drop a bomb on a presumed ISIS headquarters,
innocent civilians will die, their families will hate us forever and ISIS will
have more recruits and more propaganda points with which to recruit them. It’s
not clear how ISIS will ever be
defeated but it is clear that the kind
of retaliation both French and U.S. officials are talking about won’t do it —
the clash between ISIS and the Western world is less a “clash of civilizations”
(as both ISIS and many of their so-called “Christian” opponents would like to
frame it) than a clash of ideals, and if the horrible last century or so of
human existence has proved anything,
it’s that you only defeat a bad idea with a better idea. It’s not clear at the
moment what should be done about ISIS, but it’s clear that the U.S. strategy of
trying to keep a three-way war going in Syria — between ISIS, the government of
Bashir al-Assad, and the so-called “moderate rebels” (who are in fact an
insignificant force; the U.S. recently spent half a billion dollars trying to
“train” them and got no more than 128 active battle participants in return) —
is utterly insane and the Russians are right when they say the only way to
defeat ISIS in Syria is to support, arm and protect the Assad government and
its professional, well organized military. Likewise the mutual threat of ISIS
is one reason the U.S. should be pursuing more and better relations with the
Islamic Republic of Iran, who are predominantly Shi’a Muslims and therefore are
considered apostates and heretics by the Sunni crazies that make up groups like
al-Qaeda and ISIS. ISIS has succeeded in the number one task of a terrorist
organization — to spread terror — and the more we respond to them by staging
bombing raids that kill uninvolved civilians, the more they will gain.

What’s
more, they’ve been experts at using the Internet in general and social media in
particular — a book on terrorism I read not long ago, by an author who had
formerly worked in U.S. counterterrorism and therefore had to keep his name out
of the book, said that the Internet is having the same disastrous effect on
world peace as the invention of the printing press and its export to Western
Europe in the 15th century. His argument is that new technologies
for spreading information and ideology often have the opposite effect than the “bringing people together” optimists often
think they will: he said that the ability of printers to disseminate
information quickly in the 15th century led to hundreds of years of
wars between different religious sects and their secular representatives in
national leadership that virtually paralyzed Europe, and likewise the rise of
the Internet will bring about more world war instead of world peace, as terror
organizations like ISIS (which didn’t yet exist when he wrote, but he saw the
signs) have a new tool of unprecedented effectiveness in bringing together
disaffected young people, mostly but not always from Muslim backgrounds
(there’s a provocative article in a recent Los Angeles Times that argues that it’s precisely Britain’s willingness to
allow its Muslim immigrants to form their own insular communities and even run
their own courts that has immunized the U.K. from the kind of sweeping attack
we saw against France, where a tradition of separation of church and state
originally designed to keep the Roman Catholic Church from dominating the
government has been applied to Muslims and thereby made them feel like they
have to choose between Islam and France). It occurred to me while watching the
William Morgan documentary that he went to Cuba because that was the game in
town for a wanna-be revolutionary in the 1950’s; had he had those feelings of
isolation and alienation in the 1930’s, he might well have joined the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War — and
today a person like Morgan might well be high-tailing it to Syria, Iraq or
Afghanistan to join ISIS.